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"Yes, I know, of course. . . "
" -- that music would affect them, especially that music, that strange unnatural-sounding music, you know how a violin. . . "
"Yes"
"Marius, she gave me . . . she . . . and she took -- "
"I know. "
"And he keeps her there! He keeps her prisoner!"
"Lestat, I beg you. . . " He was smiling wearily, sadly.
Imprison him, Marius, the way that they did, and let her go!
"You dream, my child," he said. "You dream. "
He turned and he left me, gesturing for me to leave him alone. He went down to the wet beach and let the water lap at him as he walked back and forth.
I tried to get calm again. It seemed unreal to me that I had ever been any place but this island, that the world of mortals was out there, that the strange tragedy and menace of Those Who Must Be Kept was unknown beyond these wet and shining cliffs.
Finally Marius made his way back.
"Listen to me," he said. "Straight west is an island that is not under my protection and there is an old Greek city on the northern tip of it where the seamen's taverns stay open all night.
Go there now in the boat. Hunt and forget what has happened here. Assess the new powers you might have from her. But try not to think of her or him. Above all try not to plot against him. Before dawn, come back to the house. It won't be difficult. You'll find a dozen open doors and windows. Do as I say, now, for me. "
I bowed my head. It was the one thing under heaven that could distract me, that could wipe out any noble or enervating thoughts. Human blood and human struggle and human death.
And without protest, I made my way out through the shallow water to the boat.
In the early hours I looked at my reflection in a fragment of metallic mirror pinned to the wall of a seaman's filthy bedroom in a little inn. I saw myself in my brocade coat and white lace, and my face warm from killing, and the dead man sprawled behind me across the table. He still held the knife with which he'd tried to cut my throat. And there was the bottle of wine with the drug in it which I'd kept refusing, with playful protestations, until he'd lost his temper and tried the last resort. His companion lay dead on the bed.
I looked at the young blond-haired rake in the mirror.
"Well, if it isn't the vampire Lestat," I said.
But all the blood in the world couldn't stop the horrors from coming over me when I went to my rest.
I couldn't stop thinking of her, wondering if it was her laugh I had heard in my sleep the night before. And I wondered that she had told me nothing in the blood, until I closed my eyes and quite suddenly things came back to me, of course, wonderful things, incoherent as they were magical. She and I were walking down a hallway together -- not here but in a place I knew. I think it was a palace in Germany where Haydn wrote his music -- and she spoke casually as she had a thousand times to me. But tell me about all this, what do the people
believe, what turns the wheels inside of them, what are these marvelous inventions . . . She wore a fashionable black hat with a great white plume on its broad brim and a white veil tied round the top of it and under her chin, and her face was merely beginning, merely young.
When I opened my eyes, I knew Marius was waiting for me. I came out into the chamber and saw him standing by the empty violin case, with his back to the open window over the sea.
"You have to go now, my young one," he said sadly. "I had hoped for more time, but that is impossible. The boat is waiting to take you away. "
"Because of what I did. . . " I said miserably. So I was being cast out.
"He's destroyed the things in the chapel," Marius said, but his voice was asking for calm. He put his arm around my shoulder, and he took my valise in his other hand. We went towards the door. "I want you to go now because it is the only thing that will quiet him, and I want you to remember not his anger, but everything that I told you, and to be confident that we will meet again as we said. "
"But are you afraid of him, Marius?"
"Oh, no, Lestat. Don't carry this worry away with you. He has done little things like this before, now and then. He does not know what he does, really. I am convinced of that. He only knows that someone stepped between him and Akasha. Time is all that is required for him to lapse back. "
There it was, that phrase again, "lapse back. "
"And she sits as if she never moved, doesn't she?" I asked.
